Jubilee was good with a needle and thread, a stitch in time ticked her hours away. With her brother growing hard as iron and his seams shredding faster than worms could spin silk, it was her job to mend and patch and baste and darn the few clothes he owned and out-wore. Carnival would come home from a day of chopping, all wet and steaming from his ax on up, his shoulder caps splitting open his long johns like foals being born. She’d have him strip down outdoors on the porch, and she’d look the other way as he peeled off every last bit of the reeking tatters and dropped them by her feet. Every day that same pile, the night’s mending, and every time Carnival standing in front of his sister full fancy, not ashamed and going nowhere. It was a ritual begun as children and it matured to an adult place that neither needed to speak of, but Jubilee knew it pleased her brother when she’d turn around and look.
She turned somersaults to return the favor. Every Tuesday, from first melt to first freeze, as a member of the Ladies’ Tumbling Club. On the small rise of pasture above Grunts Pond, every girl in town letting herself go for an hour of her life. End over end, forwards and backwards and sideways, from seated, from standing, tucking their knock-knees as their feet flew over their faces and opened the petals of their skirts. Jubilee and True and Frainey and Zebeliah, and Petie and Loma, and Onesie and Twosie and Threesie, and Knotsy—all of them, in unison, in pairs, one after another, like a cluster of pinwheels in the high summer grasses, turning turning turning. And the boys in town would watch as the petals peeled to dainties, lying on their stomachs so their pleasure wouldn’t show as the girls tumbled to them and tumbled away and their dainties fluttered and whispered, each flip a glimpse of the forbidden, and sometimes, just for Carnival’s sake, a bit more.
Russet and Circe were themselves no strangers to the attractions of familiar flesh, but the heat they saw rising between their son and his sister was unsettling even for first cousins. Circe insisted that Jubilee offer her sewing skills to the other families in town, to cousins first, second, any—to stitch her time among more suitable suitors. Someone too smart or not smart enough, someone related but not too related, a shallow pool, yes, but too shallow? (It seemed to be.) On the side too smart there was Kennesaw Belvedere in a crown of laurels and a toga edged in gold, standing on a Corinthian plinth and glowing alabaster. He was the suitor every family sought and his indifference to all who sought him made him all the more attractive, and the more attractive he was the more indifferent he’d become. Kennesaw was exacting with his hems and inseams; he liked his pockets darted and his buttonholes bound. Jubilee’s work was tidy, but her loose whip stitches on Carnival’s ever-busting britches showed a lack of finesse that fell short, and Kennesaw was not above pointing out that had she taken the care to feather-stitch, the tighter zigzag would keep her brother in his pants, you’d think she’d want that. Still, Kennesaw had mending and Jubilee had skills and Russet and Circe had hopes for this more fitting union. The alternative suitor, on the end not smart enough but appropriate enough, was the Minton with the biggest sniffer of all, Hinkley’s son Hunko. Hunko didn’t know a featherstitch from a fishhook and didn’t care if his seams split or his hems frayed, but he knew enough to demand that Jubilee do for him what she did for Kennesaw because what mattered to Kennesaw mattered to Hunko. Circe instructed Jubilee to ply her needle through Hunko’s clothes, too, in case too smart proved too difficult to land, so Jubilee not too happily got out her tools and her spools and whipped up some hems for him, too, darn it. Surely, all this sewing would lead to sowing more seemly and a suitor more suited to their daughter than their son.
But Carnival would have none of it.
He swung his ax for practice as he did for production, it was his labor and his leisure, he kept it with him always and he kept the edge blood sharp, and the closer anyone got to his sister, the sharper that edge sheared. It lay in the grass beside him on the Tuesdays the ladies tumbled, flashing sunlight like a warning beacon as his sister bared her bloomers his way and the other boys knew to keep their distance; it cleaned his fingernails as he watched Hunko watch Kennesaw watch Jubilee tend her mending on their hems and cuffs and inseams especially; it came to the dinner table with him and it made his parents mind their manners when he ate off his sister’s plate. Jubilee tumbled and Carnival menaced, she threaded and he dared, she fed his devotion and no one could stop them.
Circe fell to consumption in the winter of the big freeze and, only a few hours after, Russet was ready to be planted in the earth, too. Carnival broke the hard ground himself with a pickax and a mattock, bursting a new section of seam with every swing, and telling himself the stinging in his eyes was sweat and not tears. Six by six he dug the hole to lay his parents side by side. Hunko built a casket for two and Jubilee featherstitched a sock for four to warm their feet forever. Those who attended the small ceremony at Nedewen Field stood shoulder to shoulder in the cold winter air, all eyes on the Aspetucks who would return to a parentless home. Everyone assumed that it was just a matter of time before sister and brother became mother and father.
It was True Bliss who looked around at all the double-joints and wall-eyes and cousin-upon-cousin couplings standing graveside and realized enough; who tried to sniff out the air between family genes and when she found little breathing room left anywhere thought don’t; who took stock of every family trait present in just about every family’s offspring of her generation staring into the pit where Russet and Circe lay cousin to cousin and pounded her Drell fist on her Minton palm and said, Stop, this has to stop, this stops with us!
True was first born of us all and laid down the law mother may I, and who was to argue when Bliss eyes looked back at Bliss eyes even though your name was Aspetuck or Buckett or O’ums? It was an argument as old as the original drop of water. Whether you believe in miracles or monkeys, we’re all cousins first and foremost, diving into the great tide as it goes out to the vast ocean of human expansion. But better that tide going out and dispersing the bloodlines was True’s point than riding the one coming in and funneling through a narrow inlet to our secluded pool where every amoeba you meet is divisible by you. Jubilee was certain in her heart that True’s theory had as much sense to it as crop rotations, and as she observed her brother and the growing split in his seat as he shoveled the last clods of dirt on the box where the last two cousins to couple lay together she knew enough to nod back at True in silent agreement.
In a small town there are only so many options for love. The first families who made their way by foot and wagon to this sheltered swath of land were strangers selected at random by whatever magnetic forces pulled them here. Some came coupled already, a child or two in tow, a baby girl in swaddling, a son soon to be born, but more arrived alone with nothing but their name and an unnamed beating in their hearts of what they could make of tomorrow.
You set sail for some new life and see ahead a distant shore and you are sure in your youthful zeal that you are the first to see it, and you can smell its earthy air beckoning to you across the waves, and in its thrall you need no sextant to guide your ship to its port. You bust up the earth there and clear a field for growing, you fell trees and hew them and build a house by hand, you want to make use of the time you have here and so you look to each other for warmth. A Bliss marries a Minton marries a Buckett marries a Drell, and as your world expands you have every expectation of new bloodlines staking their claims in neighborly fashion and new opportunities for romance and sure enough they come. Now a Swampscott for a Minton and an O’ums for a Bliss, soon a Saflutis meets a Buckett and a Drell a Belvedere. But comes a day when Engersols and Hurlbutts and Hackensack/Whiskerhoovens run out of Aspetucks and Soyles, and the new additions in town trickle to a Trousard, then an Upland, and at the very last, a Lope. One morning you wake up and there are no more new neighbors to come, and the small town of options you thought would grow and grow starts to shrink and shrink, bringing you back to a Bliss marrying a Minton marrying a Buckett marrying a Drell marrying a Bliss marrying a Minton marrying a Buckett marrying a Drell. Eyes cross, joints double, wombs go barren, newborns pass. Cousins run out of cousins. And what’s left is Aspetuck on Aspetuck or nothing. No love. Cold feet forever.
True’s admonishment was as sensible as heavy wool socks. If Jubilee knew what was good for her, she’d knit herself a pair right quick. Then again, she could go the way of Frainey Swampscott, down a path as ancient as the first dalliance, but that was a different animal altogether, from which there would be no turning back.